The Western Pennsylvania Prostate Tissue Bank

This tissue bank serves three functions:

  1. A Tissue Bank of normal, preneoplastic and neoplastic human prostate tissues in the form of radical prostatectomies, biopsies, and metastatic tissue from patients with terminal prostate cancer.
  2. A Serum Bank of lymphocyte isolates, whole blood and serum from patients with corresponding tissue reserved in the Tissue Bank.
  3. A Cell Culture Facility to provide normal and neoplastic primary cultures. The Tissue Bank, Serum Bank, and Cell Culture Facility work together as a comprehensive program to provide valuable research resources investigators both at the University of Pittsburgh as well as collaborators from other institutions.
Prostate cancer, the most common cancer among men in the United States, is a disease of advancing age, leading to increased morbidity and mortality. There has been a recent upsurge in the incidence of prostate cancer in the United States due to increased longevity and better detection of microscopic foci of cancer. There is now a recognition of precursor lesions like high grade PIN and the indolent course of certain low grade prostate cancers, which has created a need for modifying the conventional treatment modalities. This requires understanding the biological behavior of prostate cancer at the cellular and molecular level. Our understanding of the cell biology of prostate epithelial cell growth control has not kept pace with the advances made in its early detection. As a result, we have not developed successful strategies for understanding or controlling the growth of local or distant disease.

The major problem has been to identify a model system that recapitulates a similar microenvironment to the human posterior prostate, where the majority of carcinomas occur. Our understanding of the biology of the prostate has been hindered by a lack of available fresh normal and cancer human prostatic tissue for RNA, DNA, lipid and membrane isolations.

The core of the Prostate Module serves three functions:

  1. A Tissue Bank of normal, preneoplastic and neoplastic human prostate tissues;
  2. A Cell Culture Facility providing normal and neoplastic primary cultures as well as a variety of established continuous cell lines;
  3. A Morphology Core.
The central focus of the Tissue Bank is to provide a bank of prostate tissues, obtained from organ donor and radical prostatectomy specimens from nine major prostate cancer hospitals in Western Pennsylvania. The banking operation enlists the services of the Center for Organ Recovery and Education (CORE) for accruing normal donor prostates, in addition to the procurement of other normal organs. The tissue bank is responsible for retrieving the tissues from the participating hospitals, processing them by the whole mount processing methodology and acquiring tissues in a variety of states including bulk frozen, fresh, cryopreserved and fixed for a variety of morphologic techniques. Whole mount sectioning and grid mapping to identify normal, preneoplastic, and neoplastic areas is critical to the verification of the histologic composition of areas sampled.

Fresh tissue is obtained for the Cell Culture Facility so that both normal and neoplastic primary cultures of epithelium as well as stroma can be supplied to the investigators. We have developed techniques that allow us to grow purified primary cultures of normal and neoplastic epithelium and stroma. This facility also cryopreserves selected cell lines once they are established and appropriately expanded as primary cultures.

The Morphology Core provides Frozen sections (FR), Light Microscopy (LM), Histochemistry (HC), Immunohistochemistry (IHC), Light Microscopic Autoradiography (LM-ARG), In-Situ Hybridization (ISH) microscopy support, Transmission Electron Microscopy (TEM), Immunoelectron Microscopy (IEM), Quantitative Image Analysis and Morphometry (QIAM) and a variety of photographic and Digital Imaging (DI) techniques. The purpose of this core is to integrate all tissue processing and morphologic support so that a single laboratory will be involved in all pathologic assessment, histologic assessment and cell biology support for both in vivo and in vitro studies.

To date, the Western Pennsylvania Genitourinary Tissue Bank has banked over 350 prostatectomies for patients with adenocarcinoma. Banked tissue includes cryopreserved epithelial cell cultures, fresh frozen whole mounts, paraffin-embedded sections, tissue preserved for electron microscopy, OCT-embedded frozen tissue, whole-mount paraffin-embedded sections, touch imprints, and pre-operative paraffin-embedded biopsies, or a combination of the above methodologies.

Additionally, the Tissue Bank has banked over 50 normal prostates from an on-going agreement with the Center for Organ Recovery and Education. These specimens are from patients who have given consent for organ donation for research and/or clinical uses (i.e. transplantation), and are typically from younger patients. These specimens provide excellent controls, as their age group tends to be less effected by prostate cancer, benign prostatic hypertrophy, or prostatic intraepithelial neoplasia. In essence these cases represent true "normal" tissue.

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